Pastebin to more actively police 'sensitive' posts

The owner of Pastebin has said that he wants to hire more staff to help monitor "sensitive information" published on the site by hackers.

Pastebin, popular with the Anonymous hacking groups, currently depends on users to flag up any illegal or sensitive material that has been posted.

Anonymous and subsidiary AntiSec have previously used Pastebin to reveal data taken from hacking attacks, including from The Sun and a website operated by Apple.

Jeroen Vader, who bought the site in 2010, said that Pastebin now attracts an average of 17 million unique visitors a month, making money from display advertising on its pages.

Many people visit the site to keep track of current issues online, but it has also been used by hackers, including recent posts covering attacks on the Youporn adult websites and the Stratfor security think tank.

Pastebin requests that users do not post password lists, or any other personal information.

In an interview with BBC News, Vader said that he presently receives around 1,200 abuse reports a day via email and the site notification system.

But he said that he is looking to hire extra staff so that the site can more actively monitor content, rather than just reacting to reported items.

"Hopefully this will increase the speed in which we can remove sensitive information," he said.

Dutch entrepreneur Vader said that personal information about himself had even been posted on Pastebin, before being quickly removed.

He also revealed that the site itself is often a target for unidentified hackers.

"In the last three months not a single day has gone by that we didn't get some kind of DDOS [distributed denial of service] attack," he said.

"I do hear from people in the hackers community that many hackers like to test their DDOS skills on Pastebin."